The Face of the Wilderness 289 



and conspicuous birds brings upon them more 

 interference than they can bear. The snipe may 

 drum on until May, and the lapwings shriek and 

 tumble in their pleasant madness of the nesting 

 season until the lanky young are grown ; but the 

 morning soon comes when the clear cry and the 

 white-patched wings are found no more in the 

 water meadows, and the redshanks have gone 

 forth by night to some wider and lonelier tract of 

 marshy land. 



The small patches of untouched fenland which 

 survive here and there in different parts of England 

 preserve a deeply characteristic picture of bygone 

 English scenery. They generally occur at the edge 

 of some wide reclaimed tract of pasture land, or 

 as a relic of the primal wilderness where reclamation 

 has been carried forward from two or three different 

 sides, but has stopped just short of completion. 

 Some of these lingering tracts of fen may also have 

 been left alone because they originally formed 

 the lowest and wettest portions of the whole of 

 the marsh ; but it is a curious fact that in some 

 cases the level of the sedgy waste is now higher than 

 that of the surrounding meadows. This is due to 

 the shrinking of the spongy soil of the meadows 

 in course of time, under the constant system of 

 drainage, while the fen is still untapped. Its 

 surface is irregularly divided between dense beds 

 of sedge and reed in the wetter and lower tracts, 

 and islets of slightly higher ground where the sedges 

 cease and bushes of sallow and hawthorn are 

 rooted in the soft black soil. 

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